“They just make me feel numb now,” Leela said. “They don’t seem real any more.”
“They seem real enough to me. I wish I knew where all this would end.” Berg rubbed his eyes. “The truth is, I invented a
reason to get you in here today. I had to know if you were part of this. I just had to know.”
“I’m not. I swear to you, I’m not.”
“And your boyfriend?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense and I can’t believe…but I just don’t know.”
“I believe you, though I’m not sure why. Because I want to, I guess. In fact, your proposal’s fine. You don’t need to touch it. I’ll FedEx the whole thing off tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m confident we’ll get this. It’s big money. I’m looking forward to working with you on the project.”
“Thank you.”
“But I have to hope, with respect to…you know, that you’ll be careful.”
“I’ll be careful.”
T
HAT FIRST SUMMER
after Leela-May crossed over, fifteen years back, Maggie used to spend late afternoons waiting out by the gatepost on Rural Route Three. She was watching for a sign from Leela-May. This was when Maggie believed—she still had reason to believe—that Leela would come back from the other side. It was the summer before Maggie’s last year in middle school and her sister’s transfiguration, not to mention the turbulent front of Maggie’s own future moving in, smoked like haze at the crest of the hill. The haze was shot through with shimmer and gold, a cloud of gorgeous and tantalizing nothing, but Maggie could not see through it.
She would bring a book and sit cross-legged in the grass, her back against a fence post, but she could never concentrate. She would shade her eyes and squint until she could just make out the hump of the Hamilton house, which she was able to do by lining up her thumb with two pines and then looking slightly to the left. Beyond the Hamilton house the rural route dipped toward swamp, but long before the mailman’s white-and-blue van came over the crest and floated onward like a galleon in fog, Maggie would see the tell-tale halo of dust beyond the Hamilton chimneys and she would abandon her book and start running.
The house, built in the old plantation style, had been derelict for so long that sections of Hamilton veranda had come adrift and jutted like wreckage from a honeysuckle sea. Maggie climbed on the rusted gates—the crossbar of the H was her lookout point—until she could make out the driver of the van behind his wheel. Then she would start shouting. “
Hey
, Mr. Boykin!
Hey
!” She would spread her wings and loft herself out from the H and crash-land on the unpaved road. “Is there a letter, Mr. Boykin?”
“One day you will either break a leg or get yourself run over, Maggie-Lee.”
“Is there a letter from my sister?”
“There’s something here from the County Council,” Mr. Boykin might say. Or: “I believe I’ve got your utilities bill.”
“But have you got one for me?”
“Well now,” he would say, making a great show of searching through the canvas bag on the seat beside him. “I don’t believe so, Maggie-Lee.”
“But there
has
to be, Mr. Boykin. It’s been a week.”
“Well, there
is
one here for your daddy.” He would hold the envelope at arm’s length and squint. “Can’t rightly read this handwriting, but I think it says—” He would squint some more and make a performance of deciphering the script with difficulty. “
Mr. Gideon Moore, Rural Route 3, Promised Land, South Carolina
. Yes, that’s what it says, but I don’t have nothing here for Miss Mary-Magdalene Lee Moore herself.”
On such jackpot days, Maggie would stand on tiptoe and lean into the van and throw her arms around the mailman’s neck. “Don’t tease, Mr. Boykin, it’s mean. Just give it me, please, pretty please.”
“It’s against the law,” he would say. “It’s a
federal
offense.
I have to put this letter in the box at your gatepost, and nowhere else, or the sheriff might could string me up.”
Maggie would whisk the letter from his hands. “He can string me up instead,” she would call. “What’s he gonna do? Shoot me?” She would run alongside the van to the double gates and then race up her long dirt drive, gasping, laughing with excitement, leaping over pot-holes and nettles, clutching at the stitch in her side, and hand the envelope to her father—“It’s here, Daddy. It’s come”—but the summer of that year was not propitious.
“How many letters does this make, Mary-Magdalene Lee?”
“Um, five, no six now, Daddy. Four that we’ve read and the one that you wouldn’t—”
“Six. This is her sixth.”
Gideon Moore studied the envelope, inspecting postmarks and stains. He turned it over and held it up to the light. Maggie chewed her fingernails. Minutes passed.
“Look at this, Mary-Magdalene Lee,” her father said somberly. He pointed to the spidery postmark. “Read it out loud.”
“June 6,” Maggie read. “Cambridge, Mass. 02138.”
“Six, six, and this is your sister’s sixth letter. What does that tell you?”
Maggie knew what three sixes told. “Mark of the beast in the Book of Revelation,” she said sadly, and her father nodded and they both contemplated the sorrowful off-white object. It looked, Maggie thought, like a pigeon shot with a BB gun. It looked like a stricken dove. Then Gideon Moore spat on the Yankee stamp and peeled it off and put it in his mouth. He chewed and swallowed.
“Daddy,” Maggie begged sadly.
“It is not that which goeth into the mouth that defileth a man; but that which proceedeth out of the mouth, Matthew fifteen, verse eleven.”
He dropped the letter on the barbeque pit beside the screen porch and struck a match on his shoe and bent to set the paper on fire. He and Maggie watched Leela-May’s words burn and curl. Black shavings twisted in the air and Maggie lifted her hand and let scorched words settle there, fragile as feathers. She closed her fist over them.
“We are going to pray for Leela-May Magnolia,” her father said.
Maggie pressed her lips to the ash in her palm. She pressed her palm to her forehead.
“Here and now,” her father said, kneeling on the stony weed-crusted ground, and motioning for Maggie to kneel beside him. Maggie, in cotton shorts, surreptitiously brushed at pebbles with one hand. “Now if Leela-May had mailed this one day later,” her father said, “that would have been a whole other story. Of course, if she had mailed this one day later, it would have been because she had been stopped on her road to Damascus and she would have written a different kind of letter, first sentence to last, than a letter mailed on the sixth. Seven is the Lord’s favorite number. How do we know that, Mary-Magdalene Lee?”
“Because God created the heavens and the earth in seven days,” Maggie said. “And because there were seven years of plenty in Egypt, and seven years of famine, and seven priests with seven trumpets marching around Jericho, and seven seals in the Book of Revelation.”
“And because the Lord said we must forgive our brother seventy times seven, Mary-Magdalene Lee. Could you forgive your sister seventy times seven for crossing over and leaving us to manage by ourselves?”
“I’d forgive her seven
million
times,” Maggie said fervently.
She understood that her father did not only mean his older daughter’s going north, though no one else in the family, as far back as they knew, had ever crossed the Mason-Dixon line. Crossing over into wickedness was what he meant, and this, Maggie knew, was something Leela-May had done long ago.
“Daddy, the next one will be her seventh letter.”
“Let us pray,” he said. He bowed his head but raised both arms in supplication, hands open, offering proof of cleanliness to God above. “Lord,” he said, “we thank thee for speaking to us in thy secret ways. Thou revealest that which is hidden.”
From under the curve of her lashes, Maggie watched the secret swirl of ants. They moved in paisley code beneath the grass. She saw things she had agreed to keep hidden and things her sister didn’t know that she had seen: Leela-May and Richard Calhoun in the back seat of his car; Leela-May and the Barnwell boys in the crawl space under the church, Leela-May with Benedict Boykin, the mailman’s son, smoking cigarettes and kissing behind the school, Leela-May and Cobb Slaughter lying on the Hamilton veranda with arms and legs tangled like an octopus tying itself in knots.
“Lord,” Gideon Moore prayed, “all things are known to thee, and thou knowest that thy daughter Leela-May Magnolia has crossed over, but thou art the Good Shepherd.”
Maggie heard the quaver in his voice. “Daddy,” she said gently.
He’s only got us, Maggie
, was the last thing Leela-May had said at the gas station where the Greyhound bus stopped.
He’s held together with duct tape and the Bible and magic numbers and us.
And his letters
, Maggie reminded her sister: his letters to the President, to senators, to congressmen, to the Pope, to assorted world leaders.
Well, yes, his letters. But we never mail them.
Sometimes he mails them himself.
You mean he’s onto us? That’s a bad sign.
Maggie reached out and laid her hand on her father’s wrist.
“The good shepherd,” Gideon prayed, his tone part plea, part reproach, “
searches
for the lost sheep—”
“Daddy.”
Her father’s sorrow was frightening to Maggie because she did not know how to shift it. He was a web of such delicate parts, of such improbable and contradictory tracery: body strong as a back hoe, fixations like flint, faith like a bonfire for heretics, compassion infinite, generosity to those in need boundless, spirit frail as a dragonfly wing.
“Let loose thy Holy Spirit as bounty hunter, O Lord,” Gideon Moore prayed, “that the conviction of sin may fall upon Leela-May.”
Maggie could see her sister in the glowing embers of the barbeque pit. Leela-May was tied to a stake. She saw her father—on fire with muddled love and bewilderment—lighting the pyre.
“Let thy Holy Spirit seize her and shackle her and return her to thy path and to thy faithful servants because thou knowest, O Lord, that Mary-Magdalene Lee is not a very good cook, nor can she be when there is summer-school homework that must be done and when the housekeeping tasks are rightfully those of Leela-May Magnolia. In Jesus’ name we ask it, Amen.”
“Amen,” Maggie said.
Every day, Maggie washed down his truck. She hosed off the dust, she smeared beeswax paste, thick as corn mush, on the scarred metal flanks, she buffed till the rust holes looked dignified and till the faded red bodywork took on a holy glow.
The logo on each cabin door—professionally done, bartered for plumbing work, designed and executed by master sign writer Boykin—nephew of Boykin the mailman (Vietnam vet) and Boykin the roofing man, all Boykins being members of the African Methodist Episcopal church in Promised Land—was growing faint.
The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon
, the sign said if one knew what it said.
“It should say
Gideon and Daughters
,” Leela-May had rashly protested once, before crossing over, before startling everyone except her high-school math teacher and Cobb Slaughter, her Math-Prize rival, by her ascent into Ivy-League heaven, before giving up on her after-school and weekend goal of perfecting the sharpening of blades: mower blades, scythe blades, rotary tillers, her sassy tongue.
“It
means
Gideon and Daughters,” her father said. “It means the Lord will provide. It means ready for all emergencies. Read your Bible, Book of Judges, chapter seven.”
THE SWORD OF THE LORD AND OF GIDEON.
SHARPENING AND FIXING.
WE WORK MIRACLES.
IF IT’S HOPELESS, BRING IT TO US
.
And people did. From the white Pentecostal church and from the black AME church, they brought that which was broken or blunt. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, even white Episcopalians, all made processional pilgrimage along Rural Route Three in their beaten-up or gussied-up cars
because Gideon Moore had a gift. Not only from Promised Land did they come, but from the farthest points of the county. They came bearing offerings—lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, outboard motors, busted tools—and they laid them before the sword of the Lord and of Gideon Moore. The floor of the barn-turned-garage was strewn with parts. In well-oiled machinery, Gideon saw Intelligent Design. He knew the universe ticked like a clock.
“In a gear shaft that works,” he told his daughters, “you can see the fingerprint of God.”
Maggie stood in the doorway of the shed with a wet chamois cloth in her hand.
“The van is clean as a soul just baptized, Daddy. Mrs. Donaldson needs you to come fix her air-conditioner. She says if you don’t get there quick, she’ll be no more’n a puddle on her porch.”
“Got to go by the Rileys first, fix one of their cars, then I’ll get to the Donaldsons. You call her back and let her know.”
“Daddy, while you’re gone, can I read Leela-May’s letters again?”
“We already have their true meaning,” he said.
Maggie wanted the other meaning, the surface one, the paragraphs that shimmered with Boston accents and strange Yankee idioms and amazing news, with accounts of the fish market and Quincy Wharf and Old North Church where Paul Revere had hung his lantern and the underground world of subway trains and music students who played for tossed coins in Harvard Square, but those letters had been annotated and hidden away. Her father had sliced up each letter with his pencil, marking off seventh letters and seventh words, calibrating the thinning out of his daughter’s soul. Sometimes the marked-off letters had needed rearranging to make clear
the code of the Lord; and sometimes advanced divination had been required. Sometimes every seventh sentence had to be marked, and only then did the seventh word of each seventh sentence make everything clear.
Rushing…underground…music…Harvard…foreign…
“She is bound at full speed on a downward path,” Gideon concluded. “She is lost—she is temporarily lost—but the Good Shepherd findeth his wayward sheep.”
Maggie knew her father pined for the letters. She knew he feared them. “Open it, Daddy,” she begged as each missive arrived. Then the trembling in his fingers would start.
“You do it,” he would say. “You read it out. You’ve got young eyes.”
While she read, her father rocked on the porch swing in small slow arcs, his hands on his knees.
Dear Daddy and Maggie-Lee:
My room is on the top floor of one of the dorms in Harvard Yard. It’s hot as grease on a griddle up here, just under the roof, but I love it. It’s so private. I can watch the world without the world watching me. Private. Isn’t that a strange new thing? Nobody knows anybody else’s business up here. In Promised Land, where everyone knows everything about everyone else, we can’t even imagine such a thing. I think about this a lot. Everything is so foreign here, and I am a foreigner. I love that. I love it that no one knows who I am.